I turn the faucet tap on with a skillful maneuver of my toes, releasing the steady flow of hot water into the bath, where it fills the empty spaces between us. The soft hum of it weaving its way through the elaborate network of pipes was relaxing to my ears, especially after days of incessant voices fighting to be heard inside my mind. A war of words from the ghosts of my past. I am at peace now, floating soundlessly upon the idleness of the water. Our freestanding tub sits graciously in the ensuite bathroom of our penthouse apartment; a long vanity table sits against the wall to one side and a large window on the other, taking up the west-facing wall where it looks out onto the city below.

New York City, a skyline of metallic blues and greys, sits tall on the water like the back of a mighty sea creature, brought to life by the bright lights of the city in flashes of orange and red. I look out onto the view of the roof of the brick building across from us, trashed with used coffee cups and cigarette butts; cracked and stained from years of partying and misuse. The endless concrete city streets below are bordered on all sides with identical-looking buildings, dotted here and there with the tops of yellow taxi cabs and crowds of the city’s inhabitants, looking more like ants from where I sit. After all this time, my breath still catches in my throat at the view. 

The colourful hues outside contrast with the pallor of the room within; inside everything is different shades of the same stark white. The white walls of the suite were permeated with a bluish hue by the name of “Ice Mist,” one of the paint swatches we had picked out together from Benjamin Moore. The floor is tiled with a salt and pepper design, a retro pattern of crystal white against a midnight black.

The tub itself is a shade of porcelain white with its bean-like shape formed of cast iron. It curls up high behind my head and completes its lower arc where it ends at the faucet. It is the grandest thing in here besides the mirror and it impregnates the room with the charm of a vintage era. In my spot, I could imagine Marilyn Monroe getting lost beneath the bubbles, her feet carelessly hanging over the edge with a retro rotary phone held to her ear. It’s what I had always imagined for myself—a luxurious life in my favourite city, the love of my life inhabiting the spaces in between, and my head finally clear of my ghosts. The things I had to do to get here were vast and difficult, seemingly almost impossible.

But there he is, across from me, his head lolling against the edge as if he were in the process of drifting off to sleep. I flex my toes again to turn off the water and his arm floats towards me, his fingers tickling my toes, and I giggle, pushing them back towards him.

He was beautiful, wasn’t he? He looks like Leo in his early Titanic days, blond hair hanging in strands around the curve of his neck, framing his jawline in messy disarray. Remembering what it feels like to put my hands through it, I reach over and do it again, freeing the tangled knots found there. His eyes are an exceptional shade of cobalt blue bordered by thick eyebrows, a scar tracing vertically through the right one. 

A grand mirror was built into the wall opposite the bath where my reflection could be made out if I leaned forward slightly, the fragile skin of my torso lifting above the water, hitting the cool air like a baseball bat. A distorted image like one of Picasso’s paintings stares back at me. Unrecognizable, but not necessarily uncomfortable. Moments like this are meant for reflection, a moment of silence against the backdrop of a busy world outside, where your mind reaches out and is absorbed by the emptiness of the room. 

I’ve never really thought much of my reflection until I couldn’t recognize the person staring back at me. I’ve been touched in many ways: spiritually, the way you feel when you’re in a church or browsing the shelves of the New York Public Library; or emotionally, like hearing the promise of an all-consuming love; and physically, touches that leave your skin raw and burning, yearning for more, for the feeling of intimacy that comes from lining up your body with another. But I never thought of the sting of knuckles on bare skin, and never would I have thought that both kinds of touches would come from the same person.

Pieces of my first love still cling to me in fragments, memories that still have me digging my nails into the fragile softness of my skin where the bruises never really faded, and scars never truly healed.

My first love taught me to love in terms of control. He controlled me with his hands and the sting of his words, using both to put me in my place. He was beautiful, and in the beginning he was trustworthy and in public he was charming, controlling the room with a smile and a joke. Then in the privacy of our home, he turned into dead eyes and cold shoulders and rough hands. By morning, his mouth carried the remnants of my love flushed pink from our kisses, while my body bore the marks that symbolized his.

He was nothing like the person I see before me now. Someone like him could never understand the simplicity of lying in comfortable silence in a bathtub like this, bubbles covering the places where our bodies meet at awkward angles. I’ve grown to really appreciate loving a simple man. Lord knows I’ve had worse. 

I remember it being loud back then. The memories cut into me like a dull blade leaving scrapes along my mind like the blood on the hands of a murderer. It was all an intangible mess, the inability to separate thoughts from dreams from reality, pieces flying at warp speed through my mind. The voices and noises banging around inside my head that were caused by the abuse my lover and tormenter inflicted on me. 

Abuse. They teach you the word, to understand what it means and to notice the signs before it is too late. But I could never truly understand it, not until I found myself bleeding and bruised, lying to my friends, to my coworkers, the nurses at the hospital, the policemen at the door who said they received a call from a downstairs neighbour. After the nights I’ve spent cleaning myself up in this bathroom to keep the questions at bay.

Not a day goes by that I don’t think about the girl I used to be, the one staring back at me from behind the glass, the one who was always one step away from breaking and never being the same, who believed in the sanctity of an all-consuming love.

Yet now I barely remember her. I look again to the cracked mirror and see the inner fragments of my soul pressed together in my reflection, right in the spot where his head impacted with the glass when he tried one last time to lay his hands on me. The sound still echoes in my thoughts, the exact moment when everything went quiet. And it is quiet. A perfect silence enjoyed together while soaking in the blood-stained water. A stark red standing out from all the white.

I can still see the image of the broken boy in the man lying beside me, the new love of my life that mingled with the old and wondered how the hell we got here.

I leaned over to ask him, staring up into his dull blue eyes. 

“Do you think we were meant to be?”

But he doesn’t answer, because he can’t answer, because he no longer has the ability to speak. Not with his head smashed in like that. But it’s all the same to me; I just might like him better this way. I’m all there is in the world to him. Washing my hands clean in the water, I reach over and stroke his cheek, finally having the ability to touch him, with him unable to lay a hand on me. Dead eyes, cold shoulders, rough hands; mouth flushed pink.  

I didn’t mean to kill the love of my life, but I couldn’t help it. If you’d have been there, if you’d had seen it, I bet you you would have done the same.